


feel you floating in me

by wecanpretend



Series: benevolence by any means necessary [1]
Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: M/M, Movie Spoilers, Post-Movie(s), Unhealthy Relationships, so many movie spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-19
Updated: 2016-11-19
Packaged: 2018-08-31 19:12:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,343
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8590288
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wecanpretend/pseuds/wecanpretend
Summary: His palms sting.





	

**Author's Note:**

> don't even look at me. you're here too, okay, that's all i'm saying. you can find me at [my tumblr](http://letmercy.tumblr.com) if you'd like to watch me be an AWFUL PERSON.
> 
> title from "bloodstream" by stateless which has become my anthem for this terrible terrible ship
> 
> The wonderful stacie_di has translated this into Russian! The fic can be found [here](https://ficbook.net/readfic/4956201)

 

Sunlight hits him. This is, itself, a surprise. That he knows and recognizes sunlight. That he wakes up. He opens-

No.

Agony. The attempt ends before it begins in nothing but sharp, lancing pain. He bites back a whimper, even as the checked breath itself rakes his throat. His mouth is full of copper, swollen and sensitive, and he keeps his eyes shut tightly as he finds all the new ways his body hurts; ways he didn’t know it could. And what a thing, to find new ways for his flesh to hurt. Here he had thought his mother had figured it all out.

Not his mother.

That woman.

Credence takes a breath, sobs on the exhale, and gets an elbow underneath him to rock himself upright. The one who won’t ever lay a hand on him or his siblings again. Not him, not Modesty, not Chastity. None of them. He has drowned her, like he has drowned the politician and half of New York by now, drowned her in the dangerous waters that fill him. After all, Credence is a river. Or maybe perhaps the ocean. Smooth and dark and filled with unseen currents while children splash about on the shore, and he is cold at the very deepest center where only the brave and foolish trod.

Cold and alone and Graves said it all, didn’t he? That he saw him, clearest of all? That he would earn the trust of the Obscurial?

Who else has Credence ever been able to trust except himself?

 

 

 

(But that’s the thing, isn’t it? He _did_ trust someone else and it ended catastrophically. Everyone is the same, through and through and Credence will never not be the casualty in everyone’s conflicts, a mess of poorly covered bruises and blood as he begs them to help while they drive the knife deeper. His adoptive mother. Graves.

Now, everyone has ended up a casualty in his.)

 

 

 

No.

No, he doesn’t want to think about Graves and his kind-unkind hands right now. He has to figure out where he is, where he can go. Credence opens his eyes bit by excruciating bit. The light still hurts, but it’s a bearable pain. All of it is bearable except the yawning maw of inescapable grief in his stomach. Not grief, betrayal, but the thought is hard to hold onto.

He forces himself upright with muscles long since used to the act of getting up and moving on. He has to move on. But a cursory look around him reveals nothing familiar, none of the streets that he knows, and now that he’s paying attention to anything external, there is just the smell of water, and sewage, and fish.

The docks, then.

Credence braces himself against a brick wall and wonders when they’ll come for him. They have to, sooner or later. He’s killed people. So, so many people, and he can’t even honestly say that he’s particularly sorry. Just. Hurt. Words, stinging like salt poured in all the wounds that have been healed.

Squib.

Useless.

The first he doesn’t fully understand, but the second he does, intimately, deeply, a cracked fault in him that has never once been touched kindly, and even thinking about it here makes his breath come fast, makes the rage swell until it crowds out his lungs and clogs his eyes, choking and choking and-

The thing, the power and wind and darkness, is still there within him. Just as it has been all along.

Credence exhales sharply, closes his raw, salt-crusted eyes. Too much to hope for that it would have been burned up in that terrible white light shot through him. The memory of that alone makes it recoil, though, popping its tension until Credence can breathe without shaking.

His palms sting.

 

 

 

(“ _Show me_ ,” he had whispered, time and time again as Credence took the brunt of punishment for his siblings, and time and again Graves had soothed the aches and pains with but a pass of his hand, and Credence knew there was good and softness out there in the world.

“ _Show me_ ,” he had whispered, mouth against Credence’s trembling skin, and what could he do but tilt his head back and say yes?)

 

 

 

New York clatters on around him, and Credence moves further into the sunlight, looking out over the wide expanse of ocean that stretches endlessly before him. Going back isn’t an option. Even if he could find Graves again, where would he go? Would Credence attack him again?

Even when he had tried as hard as he could, Credence still couldn’t bring himself to hurt him the way he tore through those other people. The house, that election party. How he snapped her neck. How easy it was to grab her and throw her to the ground. Graves had just slipped out of his grasp time and time again, and in the height of his rage, Credence still couldn’t hurt him like he hurt everyone else.

He didn’t want to control it.

But Graves’ eyes and the wonder there and the wide spread of his hands, and Credence is as weak as everyone has ever told him he is.

 

 

 

(Credence wants him still, is the worst part. Wants Graves' hand, steady against his neck. Wants his low voice right in his ear and the firm press of his body and the movement between his hands, his lips, his thighs. Wants him badly and knows he shouldn’t.

Even now.

Even after everything.

Credence wants to feel the pavement under his knees and the hand in his hair and know that, for a short while at least, he is doing exactly what he needs to. He had been grateful. He had been pleased. Knowing that he was being rewarded for his behavior, and the warm magic but tight hand should have warned him that it wasn’t meant to last. That it wasn’t good.

It had only excited him instead.

How could he have known, though? All Graves had done was talk to him. He had been kind, had touched Credence gently. So gently. Had looked at him and actually seen him instead of passing by like so many others.

“ _You’ll do,_ ” his eyes seemed to say, and Credence hates that it felt like enough.)

 

 

 

A man in a blue coat, the man who had spoken to him and watched the last shrivel of him, tattered and torn, scatter to regroup, boards a boat with halting, awkward steps. He had a wand, Credence remembers. Had been one of the only ones who had meant it when he said he wouldn’t hurt him. And hadn’t. Had stood between Credence and Graves, making sure Credence wasn’t injured.

A thought.

A teacher.

Graves isn’t the only wizard out there. Not with the whole force of them that showed up. And Credence isn’t alive anymore, is he? Not here, and certainly not in Britain, where the man comes from. He could learn more about his magic. Maybe even focus it the way the others could, the way Graves could, effortless and wordless as he held Credence down, as he healed him.

Credence wants Graves with a fire that matches the twisted sense of wrongness in him, and that propels his feet forward; that slides him back into the enveloping shadow as a ship leaves the harbor and he slips on board.

Whether he wants to make Graves proud or dead…

He doesn’t know.

There’s a lot he doesn’t know. It’ll be alright. He’ll figure it out.

And he’ll start by getting on that boat.

He’ll start by unfurling the growing mess within him and learning its growls like the feral dog it is. He’ll learn, tame it to heel until he lets it go. And then Graves will see him and tell him how wonderful and useful he is, how he was wrong to not teach him.

And then Credence will make him regret it all and bear him down into the darkness.

 

 

 

(Perhaps it would have been more merciful to have never woken up again at all.)


End file.
